Franco Martelli wrote: >> The question is, will users realise that they're putting the files in >> *root's* home directory, and will they even know where that is? > > A minimal assumption of knowledge base of the FHS ¹ and tilde-expansion > should be take by Release Notes writers. I think we shouldn't worry about > this.
It's possible to be a heavy commandline user for a long time without discovering that ~/ can expand to /root/. But we've got onto a sidetrack from the main issue of this bugreport, and I probably shouldn't have brought it up in the first place, since files are dropped into ~/ in quite a few of the recipes in the Release Notes, and changing them all would be more trouble than it's worth. (So this email really ought to stop here.) >> If we really can't suggest using /var/tmp for this, that seems a pity; >> that location *shouldn't* be wiped on reboot, and it's usable whether >> you're running "sudo; screen" or "sudo screen" or "screen; sudo". > > It's more popular to use a non-privileged home directory. I don't follow: /var/tmp is a non-privileged location that anybody can write to, and continue accessing before and after switching to a different user account. On the other hand, files created in /root/ aren't accessible to normal users, even if they know where to look. > Few people strictly adhere to the FHS ¹ specifications. People who diverge from the standards (e.g. by setting up an overenthusiastic tmpreaper, if that's what you're thinking of) need to remember their automated footguns and make allowances for them. > This is why I am in favor of > using tilde-expansion. No matters if the reader becomes root or runs > "script" as non-privileged user: the files will always go in the home > directory, where they will be used by "scriptreplay" command. By doing so we > won't have to take care of where the files reside. This is backwards. If I use ~/, it expands to whatever home directory is listed in /etc/password for my current user, and that can vary non-obviously depending on what user I am. The alternative is to give an explicit path like /root/, in which case it's obvious what location it's talking about - though it'll fail if they haven't run sudo yet. Then again there's the option of using ./, which is another can of worms. Part of the problem is that we don't have a section saying "start by getting a root commandline in a sane shell with a sane PWD"; if we did, that would also be a good place to go into the question of appropriate locales. Or maybe it would just encourage users to skip that whole boring section to get to the "apt full-upgrade" part. > ¹ https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/fhs.shtml Most users haven't read that. I know *I* hadn't looked at it since before they updated it for /run and usrmerge and so on. -- JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
